NOMA for MIMO Visible Light Communications: A Spatial Domain Perspective

In this paper, we propose a novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique from a spatial domain (SD) perspective for indoor multiple-input multiple-output visible light communication (MIMO- VLC) systems. By fully exploiting the spatial distributions of light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters in the ceiling and users over the receiving plane, SD-NOMA is achieved by assigning all the users to different LEDs in the MIMO-VLC system. Hence, each user only receives data from a specific LED and users assigned to the same LED can use the overall modulation bandwidth of the system. Moreover, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) based LED selection scheme is further proposed for each user to efficiently select its desired LED. The achievable rates of a general indoor MIMO-VLC system using conventional MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiple access (MIMO-OFDMA) and the proposed SD-NOMA are analytically derived. The superiority of SD-NOMA over conventional MIMO-OFDMA for multi-user MIMO-VLC systems is successfully verified by detailed analytical results.